lcz
had the good fortune to get herself invited to a special conference
entitled "Imagining the Future: Visions of the World to
Come".
This conference took place on 30th November 2001, starting with
a short video by Arthur C. Clarke on his predictions
for the future. He then joined the conference by telephone.
Moderated by Scott Kirsner, (columnist and editor,
including Wired
magazine), the other guests were: Raymond Kurzweil (supreme
software inventor, e.g. of OCR & speech recognition, and visionary
author); Alison Taunton-Rigby (top industry biotechnologist/geneticist
and humanist); and David Cyganski (WPI professor of electrical
and computer engineering, expert in machine vision).
(For more plaudits, see the WPI page.)
lcz reports that it was a well-produced conference and well worth
attending. For those who couldn't be there, the whole thing is
available on streaming video from the WPI
site. (Note, it is 2.5 hours long.)
We had previously come across Ray Kurzweil in relation to Blade
Runner when an article recommended by Lukas and wamccabe on the
newsgroup had some of his thoughts on the reality of future technology
presented in various Film and TV SF. lcz had the foresight to
print off the article before going to the conference and thus was
able to get Ray's good wishes to all of us signed right next to
the appropriate section. The original article which lcz printed
off was written by Joey Gardiner and appears at Silicon.com.
Copyright is of course theirs and I recommend you to their site
which is a great place for Tech News (although very frustrating
when you want to find old articles!).
Here are the scans of the relevant parts of the printed pages,
including the written message, (click to enlarge):
In case you don't want to look at the images, the dedication from
Raymond Kurzweil reads, "Nov 30, 2001. To Netrunner and the
denizens of alt.fan.blade-runner, Have a better one (and a better
future!)" {Signed Ray Kurzweil}
Joey Gardiner described him thus: "Ray Kurzweil is
the founder, chairman and CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, known for
a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind as much for his
piano synthesiser and other breakthroughs. He wrote The Age of
Intelligent Machines while at MIT and was awarded the 1999 National
Medal of Technology by Bill Clinton."
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